Whenever there is significant technological change, "most human beings go on defense — they don't like it. But a small group takes the complete opposite take," Gary Vaynerchuk told the wire service Zenger. Known as GaryVee to his fans, the 47-year-old is a serial entrepreneur, business consultant and CEO. He was number one on the first Forbes list of Top Tech/Business Influencers, has tens of millions of followers on social media and is the author of several bestselling books on business, including Twelve and a Half: Leveraging the Emotional Ingredients Necessary for Business Success.
Central to Vaynerchuk's success is his ability to recognize trends early and to use that information to make money for himself and his clients. In the 1990s, Vaynerchuk recognized the power of the young internet to transform his father's liquor store. He renamed the store Wine Library and, by selling wine online, increased its annual revenue from $3 million to $60 million in just five years. Today, he is doing much the same thing for some of the world's biggest companies through his communications company VaynerX, located in New York.
The power of social media
One of his most successful companies is the VaynerX subsidiary VaynerMedia, a media agency that works with Fortune 500 companies, including PepsiCo, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson. Describing itself as "a truly consumer-centric storytelling engine" on its website, the agency creates social media content for its clients and grew by more than 30 percent last year with $188 million in revenue.
Vaynerchuk has a lot of experience using social media for business. In 2006, he began a hugely successful YouTube series called WineLibraryTV, and today, nearly four million people subscribe to his YouTube channel GaryVee, where he documents his life as a CEO and answers questions from his followers.
Born in Babruysk in the Soviet Union (now part of Belarus), Vaynerchuk and his family moved to New York when he was three. Even in school, he found ways to make money — like selling baseball collectors' cards. In 2009, he and his brother founded VaynerMedia. Five years later, he co-founded the restaurant-reservation app Resy, which was later sold to American Express.
Vaynerchuk's latest interest is in non-fungible tokens (NFTs). He created his own NFT collection, called VeeFriends, and organized a Web3 conference in Minnesota, called VeeCon. To promote his latest book, Vaynerchuk offered a free NFT to all social media followers who preordered his book in bulk, which resulted in over a million sales worldwide in one day. "Eventually, we will all interact with NFTs because they will be our airline tickets, membership cards and more," he says. "It is inconceivable that, in 15 years, there'll be any organization that doesn't have NFT infrastructure integrated." With Vaynerchuk's history of recognizing trends, that's worthy of attention.
Closer look: Non-fungible token (NFT)
Crypto coins are fungible, or interchangeable. One bitcoin, for example, is the same as any other. An NFT is not interchangeable. It's a digital asset that represents an object (often an artwork). Each one is encoded with data that makes it unique. NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain, which logs those who hold and trade them.